


the menageries of man

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [31]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Wonder Woman (Comics)
Genre: Children, Drama, Earth-3, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Mirror Universe, POV Female Character, Poison Ivy's Ridiculous Superpowers, amazon attack, fusion cheetah btw, hero-villain banter, just often enough to be annoying, superhero parenting: the saga, superwoman is the worst, this doesn't actually happen every time Harley goes out, this is the best worst superhero team, ultimate frisbee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2018-12-31 19:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12139305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Ella grinned, waved again, and twisted to look up at Harley and ask, “Can we go get popsicles now? The coconut ones?”Harley snorted and tweaked the wheat-blonde ponytail. “I’d been waiting to see how long it would take you to ask that. Yeah okay, tiniest sugar-plum, let’s…”That was when it hit them.It was far enough away that it did not swallow the world as it would have at close range, but the noise still broke across her consciousness and vibrated through the soles of her shoes.Somebody’s driven a truck through a wall,Harley told herself.It’s a perfectly normal unfortunate accident. They don’t need me.





	the menageries of man

**Author's Note:**

> There's a spoilery minor content warning at foot of page, if Superwoman's involvement makes you uncomfortable, which is understandable.
> 
> (Quick reminder, since it's been a while since he came up, that Barry Quinzel is Harley's canonical younger brother, at least prior to Flashpoint. I dunno about now, eh.)

Harley Quinzel adjusted the wire-framed glasses that constituted a large part of her disguise to make sure they wouldn’t fall off into the deep pit of the enclosure, then leaned in over the metal guardrail to point at a pair of recumbent speckled forms. “See, there’s Bud and Lou!”

“Bud an’ Lou!” Ella cheered, waving wildly. The larger hyena looked marginally interested in the fuss; Harley thought he’d learned to recognize the two of them. The two carnivores had gotten visibly depressed after their clan head, Lisa, had died a year and a half ago, and started spending more time near the front of their enclosure, as if social contact with humans was reassuring.

“Mommy?” said Ella, once her burst of waving had died down.

“Yes?”

“I really wanted to bring them some of Unca Waylon’s awesome sausages.”

“I know, honey, but like I told you, the spices would upset their tummies. Besides, the zookeepers feed them exactly what they need every day. If we sneak them treats, too, they’ll get fat!”

Ella giggled. Conscientiously Harley added, “And that would make them very uncomfortable and be bad for their health.” She had no intention of raising a daughter with body image issues, and the groundwork for that had to start here, with not providing underpinnings for the irrational, and thus unreasoning and dangerous, terror of weight gain.

(In the eight years since she’d gotten involved in Gotham’s underground food distribution efforts, seeing the number of children living near starvation in such a wealthy city had been terrible. The numbers who, because of the economic pressures driving down the prices of industrially processed simple carbohydrates, were badly overweight and _still_ malnourished, was heartbreaking in a different way.)

Ella had, of course, lost interest in her tiny sermon. “They look bored.”

They probably were. But they’d perked up a lot over the last year, and didn’t seem unhappy. Sometimes Bud and Lou still wrestled. “Mostly they’re relaxed, but they probably are pretty bored,” Harley admitted. There was only so much entertainment they could get out of a chunk of rope and a pair of leather chews, and each other’s constant company. If she and Barry were locked up together in a space the size of a particularly large swimming pool for even a _month_ , they’d be pretty sick of each other. Honestly she wasn’t sure she’d be getting along terribly well with _Pam_ under those circumstances. She and J might manage, but only assuming they spent a lot of time plotting their escape.

“We should tell the zookeepers to take them for walks!”

Harley tried her very best not to laugh. “That’s a pretty cool idea,” she said, once she’d managed it. “Gotham is a little crowded for that, though. I think they’d get scared of the taxi drivers.”

Ella nodded thoughtfully, staring through the bars down into the hyena habitat. “So they need a field trip to Africa.”

Harley smiled, a little wryly at the phrase ‘field trip’ that Ella had been applying to every possible form of outing since her teacher took her class to a planetarium, and didn’t point out the many impracticalities, or the fact that having been born into captivity Bud and Lou would be hardly more able to function on the savanna than in midtown traffic. There was a limit to how much reality you should force on a five-year-old and she had, if anything, already exceeded it.

“I bet they’d enjoy that,” she admitted. Which was entirely true.

Ella grinned, waved again, and twisted to look up at Harley—she sought out adult eye contact more than most children her age; it was one of the things that made Harley worry she wasn’t getting enough peer socialization, but really she might just be precocious—and ask, “Can we go get popsicles now? The coconut ones?”

The ‘Jungletopia!’ concession stand at the Gotham Zoo was the only known source of coconut-milk-based popsicles in the Gotham area. They’d tried making their own last year, without great success—the results hadn’t been _bad_ but they hadn’t been much like the overpriced but admittedly delicious zoo treats; Ella had been disappointed. Pam was happy to provide coconuts but they weren’t exactly an easy food to process.

Harley snorted and tweaked the wheat-blonde ponytail held up by a sparkly purple scrunchy at the back of her little girl’s skull. “I’d been waiting to see how long it would take you to ask that. Yeah okay, tiniest sugar-plum, let’s…”

That was when it hit them.

It was far enough away that it did not swallow the world as it would have at close range, but the almighty crashing sound still broke across her consciousness and vibrated through the soles of her shoes, and caught at her lizard-brain saying _run or fight_.

Oh, no. Not now. Not with her daughter right here.

 _Somebody’s driven a truck through a wall,_ Harley told herself. _It’s a perfectly normal unfortunate accident. They don’t need me._

Then she turned around, and saw a gold-touched figure rising through a plume of dust above the great cat area, long black hair blowing in the wind, with a long spotted creature—jaguar or cheetah or even hyena; Harley couldn’t tell from this distance—hanging from one hand.

_Superwoman. In Gotham. On unfriendly terms._

Not that she often went anywhere on _friendly_ ones.

Harley took a deep breath, and then pivoted, lifted Ella smoothly into her arms, left the disquieted pair of hyenas behind, and joined the wave of fellow zoo-visitors shaking off their first paralysis and streaming toward the main gate. There were emergency exits at other points around the park, but they weren’t terribly well marked, and from here reaching any of them involved going closer to Superwoman. If emergency authorities weren’t called by any other means, alarms would go off when the first person unlatched one of those gates; it should be soon.

“Mommy?” Ella whispered. She wasn’t crying, or panicking, like some of the other children. She was familiar with having to leave places in an organized rush.

“It’s okay, baby,” Harley promised, tightening her arm across her daughter’s back. She was almost too big for this. Too big now for Harley to carry her around under normal circumstances, except a little way to bed, or out of it. “Popsicle’s going to have to wait for another day. Hold tight to me.”

Behind them, there was a horrible, broken-off screech as Superwoman murdered the spotted probably-cat. They were too far away to hear if she let the body fall. Harley paused for a second in the lee of a potted tree and glanced behind—she was still hanging in the balance between getting away from here, like any reasonable citizen, and the tug of her sense of civic responsibility as a deranged vigilante that was urging her to leap forward and stem the threat to her city.

As if she could do anything against _that._

Depending on what the Amazon princess wanted, this might be one of Ed’s worst-case scenarios in play.

There was a second almighty crash, this one high and almost musical, as Superwoman shattered the glass greenhouse that had held one of North America’s most varied and carefully tended tropical bird collections. The number of screams on the wind redoubled. Harley sighed. At least as long as you could hear her breaking things, you knew she was busy elsewhere.

The closer they drew to the exit, the more congested the pathways became. People pushing and shoving against each other, not quite crabs in a barrel but definitely a traffic jam slowing toward cold molasses. She didn’t have _time_ for this. “Hold on tight,” she whispered again, and waited until she felt Ella’s grip around her neck grow firm and sure, and little legs locked tight around her waist. Then she jumped.

Up onto the nearest bench, to its back, and then a long leap onto the recessed side of the monkey cage, where she clambered up the bars like a monkey herself and then scrambled sideways along the bars, until she drew even with the top of the decorative pseudo-bamboo wall separating ‘Jungletopia!’ from ‘Home on the Savannah.’

Normally, this kind of stunt would gain her the attention of all fellow zoo patrons and the deep disapproval of Management. Just now, nobody cared.

Except the monkeys, several of whom considered a climbing human much more interesting than distant loud noises they didn’t have the context to evaluate. A macaque gazed up at her with a strangely solemn gaze, and a golden marmoset scampered down the inside of the cage to inspect her at close range, huge eyes fixed in fascination.

“Don’t bite me, there’s a sweetheart,” Harley cooed as she inched into position. That was all she needed, sharp monkey teeth in the finger. Ella, who had been craning her neck to look back at the monkeys from this uniquely close vantage, giggled a little, which showed that Harley was at least controlling her feelings well. Ella was a sensitive girl, and even really self-absorbed children tended to pick up their parents’ tensions more often than not.

Ella knew this was bad, that had been a nervous sort of giggle, but she wasn’t _terrified._

Harley gathered herself again, as best you could clinging to the side of a monkey cage, and leapt from there to the top of the wall, wrapping her left arm around Ella in flight to reinforce her grip against the sudden stop of alighting on the wooden beam. Rose from her crouch to survey the options ahead of her.

She could jump onto the top of the concession stand from here, or she could go right along the top of the wall and hop over onto the roof of the reptile house. The latter took her further out of her way, but was less likely to result in disaster, and if that tree by the far corner of the reptile building was reachable from the roof, then she could probably make it onto the exterior wall and leave the zoo without dealing with the panicking crowd again at all.

That was the plan, then. “You doing okay, Ellie-pet?” she asked, hoisting her daughter up to settle her more securely against the front of her pelvis. She wished sometimes that she was tall. No matter _how_ in-shape she stayed, in a couple of years she wouldn’t be able to carry her little girl around _at all_ anymore.

“M’good,” Ella confirmed, sounding just like her father.

The risk of this route was that she was visible from above and Superwoman might notice her. Better move fast, then.

She did. The exterior wall turned out to have electrified wire along the top, but vigilantism was a complicated field and Harley had learned a lot of useful skills in the time since she’d run away from Arkham, and she never went anywhere without basic tools and a strong carabiner.

Once she hit sidewalk, Harley cut through a couple of alleys—worrying about the sort of predators that sometimes lurked there was something from another life, and even if it hadn’t been, it would have seemed a hilariously petty concern under the circumstances—and came out a few blocks from the zoo, where the panic had not yet spread. You couldn’t see Superwoman from ground level here; the buildings were hardly skyscrapers, but they were tall enough to block out most of the sky.

A 317 bus was just rolling into the stop. Harley closed her eyes for just a second, before striding toward it. “You’ve got your bus pass, right sweetheart?”

“Yuh-huh.” Ella began wriggling in her arms, no doubt trying to pull it out to show her. The bus was almost finished disgorging passengers, and Harley cut into the middle of the line of those waiting to get on. This provoked some annoyance, but not enough that anyone actually gave her trouble about it. Most people didn’t, when you were carrying a child. The Superwoman panic hadn’t reached this block yet, or they would have been less reasonable.

“Great. Okay, you remember daddy’s friend Lei, right?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“When the bus driver says you’ve made it to Third and Levitt, you have to get off, okay? I can’t get on the bus with you right now, so I need you to remember. Third and Levitt.”

“Third and Levitt,” Ella repeated, clutching the bus pass.

“Wonderful. Then when you get off, there’s going to be a red door with dragons around it. Go in there and ask for Lei Bao until they let you in the kitchen, and then tell her what happened.” She didn’t bother to remind her not to let on whose daughter she was where anyone but Lei Bao could hear. Ella knew that part cold by now.

Ella drew a little hiccupping breath, and Harley knew that this was wrong of her. Putting her five-year-old on an unfamiliar bus route alone, during a crisis. It was _wrong._

But her little sugarplum fairy knew how to ride the bus. “You have to stay?” she asked softly, not quite whining.

Harley almost wished she would cry. That she’d beg for her mother not to leave her and Harley would be forced to choose her over mad efforts to stem the rampage of a living goddess. “Somebody’s gotta stand up for Bud and Lou and everybody,” she said, and Ella buried her face in her neck.

“You’re the _best_ Mom,” she declared, which made Harley’s heart break all over again. No, she really wasn’t.

“Not nearly as good as you are a daughter,” she whispered back. “Love you. Be careful.”

Ella’s arms tightened enough to almost choke her. “Come home soon.”

They were up to the door now, and Harley set Ella’s feet down on the second step, caught the eyes of the woman driving the bus and said, “Third and Levitt?” because the drivers who hadn’t been driven to the point of loathing all passengers often _were_ quite happy to help if you just asked, dropped a kiss in her daughter’s hair, and slipped away. Ella let her go, already turning with her pass outstretched.

Harley put the bus behind her as impatient passengers filed on, pushing Ella back into seating, and set her course back toward the zoo, and Superwoman.

Word had it Princess Diana’s exile last year had been for reasons of ‘getting too involved in Man’s World and generally being a psycho hose.’ Or words to that effect. Themyscira had finally acknowledged that its most powerful daughter was A Problem.

No one was impressed. On the one hand, it deprived Superwoman of a secure and comfortable base of operations to retreat to after a defeat, an advantage which had allowed her to escape almost all pursuit on multiple occasions, and it dramatically lessened the chances of her recruiting fellow Amazons as backup.

On the other hand, it meant the rest of the world now had to deal with her _all the time._

“In premodern societies,” Harvey Dent had said when the news arrived, “exile was a fairly common punishment for those who proved themselves unfit for society. But in the modern age, it seems more than a little irresponsible.”

Especially, it had been heartily agreed, when the exile in question was this powerful. And angry. And had this little respect for law and authority of all kinds.

Right now, the exiled Princess was hanging in the air over the zoo, throwing small, hard objects (rocks?) downward with vicious precision. So far she’d seemed more interested in breaking things than hurting people, but that didn’t mean she _hadn’t_ hurt anyone, or that she wouldn’t turn her focus there once she’d destroyed enough city property and rare animals.

Owlman must have done something to annoy her. And he might eventually appear to take up her challenge to his authority, assuming he was in town, and not busy with something he considered more important. If he did, then the Circus would be _perfectly happy_ to step back and focus on containing the collateral damage while the pretentious assholes duked it out; it wasn’t like Harley and her family got paid for winning fights. Or at all.

It would be _nice_ to give the Owl the poke in the eye of taking out someone who’d challenged him, and it would be _preferable_ to get it wrapped up on their terms soonest, before any more damage could happen. But not nearly nice enough to induce them to fight the Owl for the privilege of courting a horrible death.

But until and unless he turned up, this was on them. Her and hers.

But _not_ her little girl.

Harley took off her wig and glasses in the alley she was using as a shortcut; tied up her hair in its distinctive tails and pressed the spirit-gummed surface of her mask over her upper face. Changed into the spandex costume she’d had balled up in the secret compartment in her purse, then transferred the valuable contents of the purse into the pouches strung around her waist with one hand, while the other tapped out an SOS for urgent backup.

Six minutes had now passed since the initial crash. She tucked the purse now full of only things like tissues, hair pins, rolled-up capris, and the wig behind a dumpster; hopefully she’d get a chance to come back. If not, she had the things it would be a real problem to lose.

Head buzzing with plans, Harlequin let herself back into the park by the rope she’d left dangling. Ran much faster back the way she’d come and then a little further, over walls and buildings and the upper rims of cages, until further-spaced attractions and rampant destruction combined to force her back onto the ground.

* * *

Harlequin came across the shattered body of the spotted cat before she reached the currently active destruction zone, and in spite of all the urgency, she stopped.

At this distance, she could see that it was indeed a jaguar. His name, or at least the name he was called by humans, had been Zapheer. He was young, sleek, energetic for his species, born into captivity and endlessly entertained by the humans who paraded by his window.

And Harley found she was just as incensed as if Superwoman had killed a person. In some ways, it was _worse._ At least a human might have said something provocative, not that that was any excuse, but at least they would have _known what was happening_. There could have been no more innocent a victim, no more unnecessary a slaughter. It didn’t matter that Zapheer had been two hundred pounds of muscle and claw. She was _Superwoman_. He might as well have been a kitten.

A beautiful kitten from a desperately endangered species, and maybe Pam was rubbing off on her because that should have made it only moderately worse but it felt like a hundred times.

“How dare you,” she whispered. Gave Zapheer’s broken corpse a nod of respect, a moment’s silence, trying not to take in the way blood had coated his gleaming fur, and hurried on.

She got within sight of Superwoman to find her menacing a rhinoceros. She was clearly hoping it would charge her so she could meet its charge by punching it to death, but the rhino had not yet consented to aggressing, standing backed up against the far wall at the base of a decorative stone tower instead, in a defensive position. It seemed to have realized from the damage she’d done to its environment that no matter how small this thing was, it was best kept a distance from.

Clearly growing bored, Superwoman began to advance on the rhino instead.

Rhinos were _extremely_ endangered. Harlequin groped on the ground and flung the nearest chunk of broken stone. “Hey!” she called, the second after it shattered against the back of the Amazon’s head. “Pick on someone your own size!”

Superwoman had taken flight as she felt the impact, possibly thinking Owlman or someone with actual powers had shown up, and now she drifted lazily overhead, out of reach—Harley could still throw more rocks at her, but now that she was looking they’d be easy to dodge.

They had almost the same color scheme, Harley found herself thinking a little wildly, as she watched the Amazon studying her from the air and tried to plan. There was no gold in her own outfit, but her hair covered that. It was sort of impressive how different an effect you could get by doing different sorts of things with red, gold, white, and black. Then again, Superwoman had a lot more naked skin, which did affect the color balance.

Superwoman alighted for a moment atop the damaged tower, ivy-festooned, now standing shattered where she had broken off the top third of it, probably with a single punch, in an eruption of charmingly natural stones and the mortar that had held them together. “Truly?” she asked. “This is all they can muster to challenge me? A clown the size of a flea?”

She shook her head. “Will you truly fight me, sister, and die for the sake of man’s world?”

Harley drew in a breath. She hadn’t had a chance to put on her full Harlequin makeup earlier, which meant that to have identified her as a clown her opponent probably knew her by reputation, which was slightly gratifying.

She had never faced the Superwoman before. She’d never wanted to have to. The woman’s show of female solidarity would be more persuasive if her record didn’t speak to her perfect willingness to abuse women under her power nearly as badly as the men. Though admittedly the survival rate was higher for women, this hardly qualified the Amazon as a feminist icon.

“Don’t buy into that kind of misogyny, Highness,” Harlequin said brightly. “This is my city as much as any man’s. I _liked_ the zoo.”

Superwoman’s mouth tightened.

Her right hand rose up, and took the coiled whip from her belt.

There wasn’t much opportunity to attack, after that. Mostly Harlequin was busy dodging. The tiny bladed tip of the Lash of Submission sliced across her collarbone, parting cloth and drawing a thin pink line, but the blade was not the whip, and Harley shook off the narrow ribbon of pressure against her brain. “You’ll have to do better than that!”

At least she was keeping the maniac occupied.

Patented Gotham Circus fighting technique.

Eventually, she screwed up. At least she still didn’t take stripes, but she overextended for balance after a particularly audacious jump. The Lash tangled around her forearm, and the Amazon swung in, keeping the line tight like a leash, and it wasn’t clear if she was planning to cut Harlequin or punch her or just kill her in one blow like that poor jaguar, but it was definitely going to _hurt._

A lean, speckled form flung itself out of the undergrowth and slammed Superwoman aside.

Not, sadly Zapheer back from the dead, but the costumed hero Cheetah, whose powers made her faster than the Amazon Princess and nearly as strong.

The Lash had gone slack, and Harley quickly unwound it from her arm as Cheetah kept their enemy occupied, dragging claws up her ribs that drew a little blood.“Sorry I’m late!” The newcomer leapt clear before a retaliatory punch could land and landed lightly, not too close to Harlequin, so Superwoman couldn’t pay full attention to both of them at once. “Some of us _can’t fly._ ”

“Did you run all the way here?” Fast running speed was, after all, a Cheetah trademark.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I took a speedboat. But once I hit Gotham traffic, you bet.”

Harley snorted at the idea of a cheetah-patterned speedboat dodging its way up the Gotham river as close to the zoo as it could come. “I hope you at least moored it.”

“Of course. Public safety hazard otherwise.”

Dodging was easier with two. Cheetah even darted in occasionally to counterattack, and Harley did her best to provide openings without getting hit. It was lucky she hadn’t brought a sword or axe, or even a shield other than those bracelets, but even the whip was quite bad enough.

As a weapon of battle, the Lash was not at its best; it was not _precisely_ an instrument of mind control, and did not instantly render its victims easily deployable puppets. But a sufficiently large mark from it followed by a command _would_ overwhelm the psyche quite thoroughly enough to take the average victim out of the fight while they grappled with it, and even without its longer-term effects, that could be devastating. (Most of Superwoman’s usual enemies notably had designed themselves costumes that covered as much skin as possible, to protect from glancing blows that would leave marks on bare skin, and whatever rigid armor their fighting style could afford, to protect against heavier ones. Last time Harley had seen a photo of Circe, she’d worn a sparkly interpretation of full hoplite armor.)

The whip additionally had a truly alarming range, and Superwoman had more control over it than logic suggested should be the case. But then, it _was_ magic.

Eventually the Lash came spiraling in from the left, at an angle Cheetah could not safely deflect with the armored panels on her forearms without becoming tangled, and unlike Harley she had the experience to recognize the maneuver, so she flung herself to the right, and Superwoman (who must have been feinting) darted in to intercept with a fist that sent her spiraling back head over heels, and would probably have crushed an unenhanced person’s skull. Harlequin winced.

Superwoman smirked, lowering her fist. “Down, Kitty.”

Cheetah pulled herself out of the dust, wiped away the blood streaming from her split eyebrow before it could impair her vision. “What you have made of that girdle will never cease to be an _abomination_.”

Superwoman snorted. “Oh yes? Think you that Earth Our Mother would shy from true use of power?” She rose into the air, out of reach; struck out with the golden lash again, and Harley just barely dived under it.

“Power,” declaimed Superwoman from on high, “is in the earth and stone. Dominance and submission is the way of all living things.”

Then it was Diana’s turn to dodge, as a mighty rope of twisted vines leapt out at her from the broken tower, like a leafy prehensile tongue. The trap failed to catch its target, but tangled with her whip so that it could not be swung, and with a throaty sound of annoyance the princess whipped off her golden crown and flung it, arcing through the air to separate the plants from their roots and sever the saplings near the base of the tower for good measure, and return to her hand.

A redhead wrapped in green, her hiding place revealed, stepped forward, calling grass and vines and shrubs to boil up around her. This was partly a productive thing to do, spreading her power through the immediate environment so she could call it into use faster and more powerfully, but also something she did for effect. It had been known to make grown men turn tail and run.

“Argument from nature,” the Wild Rose of Gotham drawled. “How _original_.”

“This place is a perfect example,” said the Amazon, gesturing to the half-demolished zoo as she untangled her magical whip from stubborn dying ivy vines. “Man, reveling in his dominance over the lesser animals.” Her lip curled. “As if there were any difference between a man and a particularly cowardly wolf.”

Cheetah showed her teeth. “Don’t talk about my father that way.”

Pam’s perfectly shaped lips curled up, half-mocking. “That’s right. Some of my best friends are men.”

Harley gave a slightly embarrassed little shrug. “Everybody who knows me could tell you my husband is one of the lights of my life.”

The princess opened her mouth to say something, no doubt exquisitely disdainful, but was interrupted by the impact of a rocket-propelled grenade against her face.

When the sound of the explosion faded, it revealed a wild laughter. “Thanks, moon-pie!” Jokester called from the new top of the damaged tower, bazooka balanced on his shoulder, fully exposed to the wrath of a woman whom a point-blank RPG had only slightly stunned. “I love you too!”

* * *

Superwoman never did get the chance to kill the rhinoceros, though she did wind up smashing through the external wall of its enclosure out into the street that ran outside the zoo, so it might wander out into Gotham and be in a lot of danger again if no one took measures to prevent it.

The heroes couldn’t afford to take these. They were focused entirely on Diana of Themiscyra.

She’d broken out of the curated 'natural environment' of the zoo, probably, mostly to get into an environment where Ivy’s plant powers were less useful. Even so a tendril of ivy managed to snag her crown out of the air and pass it to Jokester like a Frisbee, one he seized and ran away down the street with, giving everyone else in his party the chance to take a free shot at Superwoman as she pursued him. Hopefully, the damage was adding up.

It was hard to tell, really. Superwoman was less indestructible than Ultraman, but she was much weaker to sharp edges than to blunt force trauma, and for the most part the latter was what they had. Too bad Crocodile was out of town, his claws would have come in handy for this.

At least the area around the zoo seemed to have been evacuated.

Jokester long-spin passed the tiara to Cheetah, who tucked it against her chest and with a superhuman sprint demonstrated that they would be the ultimate champions of a statewide Ultimate Frisbee championship. (Running with the frisbee was against the rules, of course, but getting well ahead of the pack to _catch_ it without interception was ultimate victory technique.)

When Superwoman’s attention snapped around to follow her stolen crown, Jokester’s heavy-barreled semi-automatic came up and successfully sent two bullets into her right cheekbone. One left a bruise.

Harlequin was playing a dangerous game. She didn’t have superpowers, and though Jokester had passed her a hammer and pistol a little way into the fight she’d run out of bullets quickly. They mostly only distracted Superwoman by making her raise a hand to block them, anyway, which she could do with only a portion of her attention. It was a better distraction to dodge in near her and taunt, and that was what the flea-sized clown began to do.

Superwoman got hold of her, finally, when she dared a little too close or dodged a little too slow, but at least by now the villain was too besieged to bother taking the time to break her neck. She just drew back her arm and flung Harley away from her.

She didn’t hit any of the nearby walls but went careening into an alleyway instead, tried to twist in the air to get her feet and arms in position to break her fall a little, even if that meant they also broke—a garbage can interposed itself before her but could not check her progress, and then the two of them together slammed into a brick wall.

Harlequin knew no more.

* * *

The fight had lasted nearly half an hour, now. Cheetah had begun to flag some minutes ago. Superwoman could have left at almost any time, since they had no fliers on the field, but of course she could not be seen to _retreat,_ even now that she had her crown back. Soon she would be freed from that dilemma, because nowhere in sight remained anyone standing to oppose her.

Heroes lay bowled over like ninepins, scattered like discarded marionettes across the wrecked patch of city street, a few buildings that had all had their front walls caved in blocking off much of the street in that direction with rubble, and while most of the fallen were already moving, twitching, trying to sit up, not all of them were. Enigma had a hand against the wall that had stopped his flight, but hadn’t managed to properly stand up again yet. He kept trying to get his lungs to fill up all the way again.

If Owlman could come fight his own grudge match sometime soon _that would be good thanks._

“The only difficulty,” the Amazon mused, looking from one fallen hero to the next, her eyes lingering particularly of course upon the men, “is in which of you to kill first.”

Enigma shoved hard to get himself upright, because however many seconds she spent reacting to the fact that he was standing would be seconds she _didn’t_ spend killing his friends while they lay helpless.

Ivy staggered to her feet abruptly. “ _No._ ” And suddenly as the breeze picked up, she seemed a little more _real_ somehow, more solid than the world around her. Impossible to ignore. Ridiculously beautiful.

Superwoman drew a deep breath, and then her pupils blew wide. “…oh,” she said slowly. Mechanically, she looped her whip into a coil and hung it at her hip. Her feet touched broken pavement. “What’s your name?”

“…Rose.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Rose.” The words were murmured, by rote, as the princess closed in upon her new target. “I think I’d like to get to know you better.”

“Is that so?” the Wild Rose asked, holding her ground. She was not a small woman, but Superwoman towered over her.

“I think,” Superwoman purred, drawing so close their breaths must be mingling as Ivy’s face turned up toward hers, “I’d like to get to know you _very well._ ”

“Shouldn’t we find somewhere more…private?” Ivy murmured.

Superwoman smirked, cupping one long hand around Dr. Eisley’s jaw and gesturing broadly with the other toward the devastated former habitat with no hero standing, and flicked her tongue between her teeth. “Why bother?”

Green-painted lips curved up. “Why indeed?”

Superwoman dragged Ivy in for a fierce, bruisingly-passionate kiss, claiming her like a prize…

…and slumped, tipping sideways as her hand fell slack. She hit the broken ground and lay slackly, her dark curls spilling across asphalt and her mouth hanging open. Someone who knew no better might have thought she slept, with all the innocence of a heedless child.

Ivy scrubbed the back of her wrist over her mouth, and stared down at the limp figure at her feet.

It was Enigma who spoke first—because he’d already been on his feet to watch the whole event, and also because for all his brilliance he was only fractionally better than Jokester at thinking before he spoke. “Did you just…did you just _seduce Superwoman_ into a _poisoned kiss?_ ”

“She’s just unconscious,” Pam snapped. Scrubbed at her mouth again. Her other arm had wrapped itself across her stomach, hand pinned under the opposite elbow to hold it in place, and if you looked closely, she shivered.

“Ivy,” Ed said, moving away from his supportive wall, concern overtaking his incredulity, “were you sure that would work?” She didn’t answer, and he repeated, “ _Were you sure?_ ”

“Of course I wasn’t sure! She’s a magical Amazon princess. I just…it was something I could do. To help. And it _worked_ , so just…shut up.”

Ed bit his lip, but held his tongue. He was good at talking to Pam only in the sense that words passed back and forth between them a lot, quick and shallow and abrasive. He had no idea what to do with her vulnerable. Especially when he was still coming down from the brink of terror himself.

“You realize,” said Cheetah, emerging from the shadows of a ruined dentist's office, looking very little the worse for wear for having been thrown through it, “that you won’t be able to lose her attention as easily as you won it. Don’t you?”

Pam shot a look at Priscilla that came close to pure hate, and knelt down to pull the Lash of Domination from its loop on the villainess’s belt. “Somebody come tie her up,” was all she said.

Jokester, just appearing over the steep barrier of shattered street, threw a pebble at Cheetah while Pam wasn’t looking, to get her attention. He used that opportunity to scowl disapprovingly at her while scrambling over rubble. The feline heroine looked slightly abashed.

“Hey, Jon, you were a Boy Scout, right?” Jokester called as he jogged down the easier slope on the inside, his voice sounding inappropriately large and glad in the strangled air. “Come share the benefit of your knotty knowledge.”

“I’ve seen you tie knots,” replied Strawman, emerging from his shelter behind an overturned truck, his voice dry and almost even as the after-tremors of adrenaline faded. “You don’t need me. But alright.” Enigma considered being offended because he had also been a Scout, but he hadn’t learned many knots and J was probably asking Dr. Crane for help as much to check on him and his occasional panic attacks as anything.

Anyway, he was keeping an eye on Ivy, even if he wasn’t sure what to _do_.

Jon made it to Ivy’s side first, took the unbreakable Lash from her hand with a restrained gentleness that was coming to be familiar to his new comrades in the Circus, and knelt to loop the magical weapon around its mistress’ wrists. Ivy took several steps back, all too glad to be relieved of the responsibility of supervising Superwoman.

“Oof.” At the clank and rattle of small stones that came in time with the grunt Ivy spun, and looked somewhere other than Superwoman or the middle distance for almost the first time since she’d dropped her pheromone bomb. Seconds later, Harlequin padded into view out of a mostly-blocked alley, rubbing her head, and blinked at the scene before breaking into a smile. “Hey, we won?”

Strawman and Jokester engaged in a brief, fierce exchange of silent glaring and shoving, each of them indicating that the other should go check on Harlequin while they saw to the knots, until Cheetah shouldered Jokester out of the way with a disdainful sniff, and took his place.

Now he shrugged, _fait accompli,_ she’d have to get her concussion check-up from her fellow doctor later, and bounded upright, replying, “ _Pam_ won. Uh, Ivy, I mean.”

“Way to go!” Harlequin exclaimed, picking up her pace to something near a scamper as she beamed at her friend, but that didn’t last long, as she took in the hunch of Pam’s shoulders and the way she was paler than even she should be. “What am I missing?” she asked. “Ivy, honey, that isn’t a victorious hero face.” She reached out, unthinking comfort and demand for eye contact in one, and the Wild Rose flinched back before the tiny hand could touch her face.

Harley’s hand drew back into an abashed fist, and then she fingercombed some more rubble from her hair and asked, all determined sympathetic practicality, “What happened?” Nobody offered an explanation straight off, much as Enigma would have liked to. Harley would figure it out.

Jokester hovered between the spot where Cheetah and Strawman were tying knots and the one where the Wild Rose was refusing to look right at the Harlequin, and after a few seconds she turned to him instead. “J. Talk to me.”

“Ivy saved the day.” Jokester shrugged, a little awkwardly. “Uh. With her…kissing powers.”

Harley’s face broke in sympathy. “Aw, _Pam._ No hug?”

Ivy shrugged tightly. “Okay, maybe hug,” she muttered, and suffered Harlequin to wrap her arms around her rib cage and press her face against the front of her shoulder for a few seconds before leaning back again.

“Thanks,” she muttered, and rubbed at her mouth some more. The green had largely transferred itself to the back of her hand by this point.

“It must feel so gross,” Harley said. “Also oops I smell of garbage, probably not helping with that. Hang on!” she said, and scrambled away, into an alley across the street from the one she’d been unconscious in, limping only slightly. She came back a few seconds later with a brown leather purse, out of which she pulled a packet of sanitizing wet-wipes. “Ta-dah!”

Jokester started to laugh. “Amazing mom-powers, activate!”

“Shush you.” Harley offered the packet to Ivy, who teased two free to wipe at her mouth, and then at her cheek where Superwoman had touched her. Took and carefully released a deep breath, and managed to return her best friend’s hopeful smile.

Cheetah and Strawman at this point straightened from their task.

“Done,” the closest thing Superwoman had to a nemesis proclaimed.

All the heroes gathered around in a ragged circle, superstitiously just out of reach, looking down at the recumbent and _very_ thoroughly bound princess. “Okay,” said Enigma, “but now what do we _do_ with her?”

“If we just leave her here, Owlman will have her untied before you know it. He’d love having her owe him a favor.”

“Maybe haul her down to the UN or something?” asked Harlequin. “She lost her diplomatic immunity when they exiled her, maybe they’ll stick her in a cell next to Ultraman’s, or something like that.”

“I’ll do it,” volunteered Cheetah. “I’ve been building contacts with Interpol and the CBI. We should be able to get her put away for a while.”

“And the entire world heaves a sigh of relief,” said Enigma.

Jokester, Harlequin, and Strawman all heaved loud dramatic sighs in unison. Ivy looked a more ordinary sort of longsuffering at them, and Cheetah just shook her head.

"So I see we're all ambulatory," Strawman spoke up quietly, to no one in particular, but with an unwavering voice, "but if anybody took hurt enough to need care, it's time to say so."

"I'm fine," said Cheetah, tapping her mask as if to say that it was not something she could take off just so someone could examine her pupils for concussion. "I have superpowers. Do any of you want to help me take her in?"

"Can't," said Harlequin. "We've got a very special package to pick up at the Red Dragon."

Jokester hadn't been worried, precisely, because he wasn't a worrier and he trusted Harley, and trusted that if she _hadn't_ gotten the 'package' away safely she would have been much less cheerful, but he let out a smaller, more sincere sigh of relief anyway.

"Medical check _before_ you go running off," said Ivy firmly, and she and Harley stared each other down for a second before Pam turned and stared at Strawman instead, until he fished a penlight out of one of his infinite patch-pockets. This seemed to have been a winning move, because Harley submitted to the exam.

"I'll come," Enigma volunteered while this went on. Drew a breath, and paused. "As soon as somebody makes sure I didn't break any ribs."

Cheetah consented to wait through this process, with slightly forced magnanimity, then slung the unconscious princess over one shoulder as the strategist was pronounced bruised and advised to take it easy.

The tallest clown bounced on his toes as they watched Cheetah haul the villain away to her speedboat, with Ed alongside, clearly ready to taze Superwoman if she woke up and tried to make a break for it. “Hey, guys," he said. "Guess what? We won!”

"It does happen sometimes," Ivy pointed out, amused.

"Yeah, but still! _Superwoman._ Once we get El home, I'm making cake."

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warning** is for what amounts to a mutual-dubcon kiss via Poison Ivy whammy. Also a bit of not-very-graphic cruelty to animals.
> 
> Writing villains is hard. :[ You have to make bad things happen. These are the themes she walked in with, okay--I don't particularly like that I've got a predatory Depraved Bisexual running around, but this _is_ the evil version of Wonder Woman's relationship with sex. (At least she isn't playing seduction games with the other top villains, which always strikes me as ooc for an Amazon princess, evil or not. That's characteristic of how women learn to leverage power in a man's world.) Anyway I blame Marston and DC for everything.
> 
> Meanwhile (and for related historical reasons imo) Poison Ivy’s powerset is ridiculous and giving it to a heroine has weird emotional consequences and Pam's life is so hard. ^^;;;


End file.
